Your TV Weatherman Is NOT a Climate Scientist

Do you believe the climate is changing? Are you concerned about the extent and speed of the change? Do you believe human activity is contributing to, and perhaps exacerbating, that change? Do you believe something should be done, or do you believe that this is just Nature's periodic way of "cleansing" the planet?

Regardless how you answered the above, here's one more question: Do you take your information about climate change from an 80-year-old guy with a journalism degree who has spent an entire lifetime as an offbeat-styled television weatherman? Apparently Fox News does.

In just one more example of Fox's non-stop degrading of journalism to the level of television sit-com, the sons and daughters of Murdoch invited career weatherman (and founder of The Weather Channel) John Coleman to denounce man-made global warning as "an incredible, bad, bad science," claiming that the media has been telling people that "we're all going to die of a heat wave" and asserting that the populations of "happy" polar bears has actually increased. Notwithstanding that the last comments alone demonstrate Mr. Coleman's profound exaggeration of the media and lack of understanding of the localized impacts of climate change, the former happy weatherman stands for Fox News as their unimpeachable expert for climate-change denial.

For nearly the last decade, Coleman has railed against climate change science from his San Diego home, calling global warming "the greatest scam in history" and suggesting that the "scam" is linked to some dark, nefarious plot to destroy the United States and institute a world government.

Forty years ago, marginal characters like Mr. Coleman -- conspiracy nuts with no relevant professional qualifications but lots of unfounded, screwball notions -- would never have been given the type of public platform granted them by (most often) Fox News. Public discourse is cheapened, celebrity is given precedence over scientific fact, the citizenry is badly served if not wholly misled, and solvable problems become increasingly unsolvable in a polarized environment that pits the informed and credentialed against loudmouths sustained only by belief and opinion.

This is not news, it's not journalism, and it's not informative. It's entertainment, it's misinforming the public (including, and especially, children), and it's contributing to America's increasing inability to solve problems of any kind.